In every hype cycle, certain patterns of deceit emerge. In the last crypto boom, it was \u201cponzinomics\u201d and \u201crug pulls.\u201d In self-driving cars, it was \u201cjust five years away!\u201d In AI, it\u2019s seeing just how much unethical shit you can get away with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Perplexity is basically a rent-seeking middleman on high-quality sources<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Perplexity, which is in ongoing talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a>, is trying to create a Google Search competitor. Perplexity isn\u2019t trying to create a \u201csearch engine,\u201d though \u2014 it wants to create an \u201canswer engine.\u201d The idea is that instead of combing through a bunch of results to answer your own question with a primary source, you\u2019ll simply get an answer Perplexity has found for you. \u201cFactfulness and accuracy is what we care about,\u201d Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told The Verge<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That means that Perplexity is basically a rent-seeking middleman on high-quality sources. The value proposition on search, originally, was that by scraping the work done by journalists and others, Google\u2019s results sent traffic to those sources. But by providing an answer, rather than pointing people to click through to a primary source, these so-called \u201canswer engines\u201d starve the primary source of ad revenue \u2014 keeping that revenue for themselves<\/a>. Perplexity is among a group of vampires that include Arc Search<\/a> and Google itself<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Perplexity has taken it a step further with its Pages product, which creates a summary \u201creport\u201d based<\/a> on those primary sources. It\u2019s not just quoting a sentence or two to directly answer a user\u2019s question \u2014 it\u2019s creating an entire aggregated article, and it\u2019s accurate in the sense that it is actively plagiarizing the sources it uses<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Forbes<\/em> discovered Perplexity was dodging the publication\u2019s paywall<\/a> in order to provide a summary of an investigation the publication did of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt\u2019s drone company<\/a>. Though Forbes<\/em> has a metered paywall on some of its work, the premium work \u2014 like that investigation \u2014 is behind a hard paywall. Not only did Perplexity somehow dodge the paywall but it barely cited the original investigation and<\/em> ganked the original art to use for its report. (For those keeping track at home, the art thing is copyright infringement.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSomeone else did it\u201d is a fine argument for a five-year-old<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Aggregation is not a particularly new phenomenon \u2014 but the scale at which Perplexity can aggregate, along with the copyright violation of using the original art, is pretty, hmm, remarkable. In an attempt to calm everyone down, the company\u2019s chief business officer went to Semafor<\/em><\/a> to say Perplexity was developing revenue sharing plans with publications, and aw gee whiz, how come everyone was being so mean<\/em> to a product still in development?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At this point, Wired <\/em>jumped in<\/a>, confirming a finding from Robb Knight<\/a>: Perplexity\u2019s scraping of Forbes\u2019 <\/em>work wasn\u2019t an exception. In fact, Perplexity has been ignoring the robots.txt code<\/a> that explicitly asks web crawlers not to scrape the page. Srinivas responded in Fast Company<\/em><\/a> that actually<\/em>, Perplexity wasn\u2019t ignoring robots.txt; it was just using third-party scrapers that ignored it. Srinivas declined to name the third-party scraper and didn\u2019t commit to asking that crawler to stop violating robots.txt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSomeone else did it\u201d is a fine argument for a five-year-old. And consider the response further. If Srinivas wanted to be ethical, he had some options here. Option one is to terminate the contract with the third-party scraper. Option two is to try to convince the scraper to honor robots.txt. Srinivas didn\u2019t commit to either, and it seems to me, there\u2019s a clear reason why. Even if Perplexity itself isn\u2019t violating the code, it is reliant on someone else violating the code for its \u201canswer engine\u201d to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To add insult to injury, Perplexity plagiarized Wired<\/em>\u2019s article<\/a> about it \u2014 even though Wired<\/em> explicitly blocks Perplexity in its text file. The bulk of Wired<\/em>\u2019s <\/em>article about the plagiarism is about legal remedies, but I\u2019m interested in what\u2019s going on here with robots.txt.<\/a> It\u2019s a good-faith agreement that has held up for decades now, and it\u2019s falling apart thanks to unscrupulous AI companies \u2014 that\u2019s right, Perplexity isn\u2019t the only one<\/a> \u2014 hoovering up just about anything that\u2019s available in order to train their bullshit models. And remember how Srinivas said he was committed to \u201cfactfulness?\u201d I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s true, either: Perplexity is now surfacing AI-generated results and actual misinformation<\/a>, Forbes<\/em> reports.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To my ear, Srinivas was bragging about how charming and clever his lie was<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019ve seen a lot of AI giants engage in questionably legal and arguably unethical practices<\/a> in order to get the data they want. In order to prove the value of Perplexity to investors, Srinivas built a tool to scrape Twitter<\/a> by pretending to be an academic researcher using API access for research. \u201cI would call my [fake academic] projects just like Brin Rank and all these kinds of things,\u201d Srinivas told Lex Fridman on the latter\u2019s podcast<\/a>. I assume \u201cBrin Rank\u201d is a reference to Google co-founder Sergey Brin; to my ear, Srinivas was bragging about how charming and clever his lie was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m not the one who\u2019s telling you the foundation of Perplexity is lying to dodge established principles that hold up the web. Its CEO is. That\u2019s clarifying about the actual value proposition of \u201canswer engines.\u201d Perplexity cannot generate actual information on its own and relies instead on third parties whose policies it abuses. The \u201canswer engine\u201d was developed by people who feel free to lie whenever it is more convenient, and that preference is necessary for how Perplexity works.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So that\u2019s Perplexity\u2019s real innovation here: shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet. The question is if any of its users or investors care.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n